Kanji Ishiwara

Kanji Ishiwara (18 January 1889-15 August 1949) was a Lieutenant-General of the Imperial Japanese Army who fought in the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.

Biography
Kanji Ishiwara was born on 18 January 1889 in Shonai, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1909 and graduated from the Army War College in 1918, placing second in his class. In 1922, Ishiwara was sent to the Weimar Republic as a military attache, and he spent time in Munich as an attache until 1925. Ishiwara would convert to the Nichiren branch of Buddhism, which held that a period of massive conflict would precede a golden age of humanity in which Buddhism would prosper.

Japanese ultranationalist
Ishiwara saw it as a divine mission to take over China and then challenge the West, and Ishiwara and Colonel Seishiro Itagaki both plotted to take advantage of the chaos in China following Zhang Zuolin's assassination in 1928. In 1931, they organized the Mukden incident, which led to the invasion of Manchuria. Ishiwara expected to be dismissed, but right-wing officers and ultranationalists admired him and promoted him. Ishiwara spoke out against the February 26 Incident rebels, betraying the extremist Kodoha faction of the army, and he was promoted to Major-General in March 1937.

Rivalry with Tojo
Ishiwara was relieved of command in China after arguing with Hideki Tojo over funding an officers' wives club, and Tojo became his political nemesis. Ishiwara was reassigned to the home islands, and he was forcibly retired after saying that Tojo was an enemy of Japan who should be arrested and executed. He opposed Tojo, the war in China, and the Attack on Pearl Harbor, and he sat on the witness stand at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1948, although he said that United States president Harry Truman should have been prosecuted for bombing Japanese civilians in 1945. He died in Tokyo in 1949 at the age of 60.